Separate Ways
by KawaiiKisses
Summary: Naomi and Roxas were best friends until she moved and then they were all sad, yadayadayada. First fic ever, so this is my first summary ever. If you read this, I will personally come to your house and do that impossible Septhiroth battle in KHII.
1. Chapter 1

Uhm... I don't really know what to write here... This is my first fanfiction, obviously. I have no idea what I'm doing, so I think you can do this review thingy. Let me know how I'm going, pretty please? And, eh, I don't live in America or whatever, so if I've gotten anything wrong pleaseplease_please _let me know, because I have no idea...

Thanks. And, uhm, I don't own any of the good characters. Everything awesome in this is owned by Disney and Square Enix. So, uhm... Cool...

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><p>It used to be just Nom and Roxas, against the world. Against their parents, against their chores, against their school, against everything except each other. They were immature and hilarious and too cool for anything that wasn't deemed 'worthy' by either of the two. Which was most things.<p>

If you were going to strike a forty second conversation with Nom and Roxas, you would learn many things. The first thing you would learn would be that they were exactly the same – they had the same sense of humour, ate all the same foods, paid attention in the same classes and had all the same video games.

But other than misbehaving and having identical attitudes, another thing that brought attention to the two straight away was how opposite yet alike they looked. They both had hair that spiked in abstract ways in the exact same places, and flicked across their foreheads in matching motions. They both had wide eyes and thick eyelashes, and they both worse baggy clothes with various arm-bands and necklaces.

Nom had dark purple hair, brown eyes and wore grey and black and green. Roxas had bright blonde hair and blue eyes and wore beige and black and red. Nom wore gold plated jewellery and Roxas wore silver. Nom looked as much of a boy as Roxas did, possibly even more so.

They weren't violent, just rebellious. They never hurt anyone, they just didn't do what they were told. They were always together, always. Once Hayner had crept around the back of Nom's house in the middle of the night to get a picture of her by herself - just to find Nom and Roxas squished up on a single bed together. They looked just as tough as usual, both clad in dark coloured boxers shorts and loose t-shirts as pyjamas.

Nom and Roxas were never in love, because they were never old enough to get over the whole 'cooties' thing. To everyone Nom was a boy and so Roxas didn't shudder when she came near, because, well, she never really left.

So when Roxas turned up to school one day with red eyes and an empty shadow by his side, everyone just stared. They all knew the story – Nom parents had finally gotten sick of her behaviour and sent her off to an all girl's boarding school over in Kingdom Hearts – but everyone had just assumed that Roxas would have gone, too, even though Roxas wasn't a girl and they reason Nom had been sent away was because of him.

And so Roxas was left to fend for himself at a school where everybody knew to keep away from him, while he slowly began to want to talk to everyone, to keep all the mashed up memories from sticking to the bottom of his shoe.

Rumours went flying that maybe Roxas and Nom had been planning to elope, or Nom had gotten pregnant. Roxas would sit in chair, surrounded by his fellow 6th graders and roll his eyes. Nom leaving had unlocked this whole rush of maturity Roxas had never been aware he had, and he would mentally scream at everyone from his seat, "_Did we ever look like a tragic romance movie? We're not like that, we wouldn't..."_

And so Roxas was shunned and rumoured about for nearly a year, until they came back to school in 7th grade. There was a girl at Roxas' school – he didn't know her, like he didn't know anyone – called Olette Hunter. She was known typically as a nice girl, who was dating the popular, sporty boy Hayner Jones. Common name, common look, but he was funny and nice and everyone liked him. Roxas, who had gotten so used to shutting out any rumours or chit-chat, didn't know any of this about the girl was sitting in his seat when he walked into the classroom on the second day of fall.

"Uhm," was all he said, all he knew how to say, and Olette looked up at him, puzzled.

"Hi, Roxas," she smiled.

"Uhm," he said again, and Olette laughed.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, her big green eyes asking deeper questions about many things Roxas knew he should forget.

"Ah, it's just..." He turned his head. "Forget it," she told her, turning to sit in the seat next to her.

"Oh," said Olette quietly. "Is this your special seat?" It wasn't said with a bite, like it was on the movies. There was no, '_I don't see your name on it so get stuffed_,' kind of thing, it was just a question.

"Whatever," replied Roxas, looking at his pale knees. "It's just a stupid desk."

"No," argued Olette kindly. "If you want this seat you can have it, you don't need anything else-" she stopped, flushing. Roxas looked at her, shocked. No one had ever talked about it directly to him. He didn't know whether he was angry or shocked or sort of impressed with how purely gutsy thing girl was.

"Sorry," she said quietly. It was obvious she wasn't talking about the seat, but Roxas didn't say anything. He just turned and got something – anything – out of his bag to distract himself.

"It's okay," he replied once he had straightened up again. "I've gotta get over something as pointless as a desk."

Olette chuckled. "That's stupid."

Roxas scoffed. "You're stupid."

Olette stood up, not slightly fazed by the boys' demeanour. "You've been alone for a long time," she said, and Roxas rolled his eyes at how obvious that statement was. Truth was, he just wasn't used to be talking to and he had no idea what this girl meant by anything she was saying because he didn't know people and the difference between happy or sad or kind and understanding.

"So, you should hang out with Hayner and Pence and me. We hang out in near that tree at the front of the school. I don't know where you hang out, because I never see you around, but if you want, we could..." she stopped talking, and Roxas spared her a glance. Her eyes are wide again, and she took deep breath.

"We could be your new friends, if you wanted."

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><p>And, so that's the first chapter. Is it just a massive pile of crud? Or should I be happy? I really don't know. <p>


	2. Prologuey Bit  2

Hi! So, one review. My first review. And it was honest, which is goodlygoodgoodgood. And, uhm, yeah. You're not supposed to be able to tell about Naomi and Nom and any of the characters yet. With these first two chapters, I'm just trying to create an atmosphere. Sorry, I don't know if you're supposed to do that or not...

So, uhm, yeah. Thanks. This chapter and the first chapter are more like prologues - and you never really get anything out of prologues.

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><p>Let's switch focus. Let's forget, for the moment, what the scared little girl with the messy purple hair and big brown eyes can't. Let's forget Roxas Krest and all his little habits that made Nom want to stay with him all the time.<p>

Instead, let's imagine how it would feel to know one thing, one person, our whole lives, only to have them torn away from us – or rather, be torn away from them – and then thrown into some school with tight uniforms and no going home on weekends.

At first it was hard. It was hard to forget about Roxas and it was hard to use up all of the room on a single mattress. Then it was hard to breathe in all day and stick your chest out like you knew who you were and exactly what you were doing.

The first two things Nom's mother brought her was a bottle of dark brown hair dye and some clothes that weren't second hand from the men's section. Nom didn't like material touching the skin of her bloated stomach, or the feeling of having her bare, chubby legs stick out everywhere.

The next thing Nom got brought was a meditation CD and a book about teenage sexuality. So Nom sat in her room and listened to a voice tell her to relax her muscles, while she curled up as tensely as she could and cried.

_This sucks, this sucks, this fucking sucks_, was all she repeated in her head. She had told Roxas that she was leaving on the Friday, when truth was she wasn't leaving for another week. So she just sat in her room and ducked behind her curtains when Roxas walked past her house sadly.

Why did her mother keep her here? She would much rather just get sent up to wherever she was being taken away to and be done with it. But apparently she needed time to calm down and realise how right this decision was.

"Right, my ass," Nom mumbled as she flicked a strand of her newly dyed dark brown fringe back and forth. She heard the bell go from her middle school and sighed. Destiny Islands Middle School just wasn't hers anymore, so why couldn't she forget it? Her legs were cold, even with the five pairs of stockings and seven pairs of socks. It was spring, damn it! Why was she wearing a stupid black skirt and a pink sweater?

Roxas had taken to talking home the long way after Nom had 'left', always walking extra-slowly past Nom's 'old' and 'abandoned' house, breathing everything old and new in. Every day he took a few steps forward to knock on the door, in hopes that Nom was hiding and then they could run away together, and every day Nom's heart jumped a million miles an hour because maybe he just might.

But he never did, and Nom always tried not to cry and Roxas' world shattered day after day and she sat there was watched, feeling as similar to him as she always had.

Her phone, shoved roughly underneath her cold and unused mattress, had swarms of messages from lots of people, some saying politely they would miss her, others saying the truth. Some were truthful, some were heartfelt, but none were from Roxas.

Nom knew there would be no messages from Roxas and that's why she didn't see the need for her phone anymore. Because Roxas knew that Nom and Nom knew Roxas and inside themselves they had both decided that it would be easier to fight to urge to reply to each other if there was nothing to reply to in the first place.

"Naomi!" called Myra Best, trying her hardest not to end her sentence with, '_You can forget about boarding school and go meet Roxas out the front!_' Myra really did know how much this was killing her daughter, but she couldn't bear to tell Nom that the apartment she was supposed to move into wasn't actually being emptied out completely until a week after Mrs and Mr Best had been promised.

So she decided to play the best cop, and not give into anything Nom had to say. She just wanted her daughter to live up to the brains she was born with, and go on with that dream the young Naomi used to babble about all the time, before Roxas and her had found video games and the internet and switched off any logical senses they had.

Naomi Best, who existed a long time before Nom, wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to travel the world and interview victims of horrible crimes like the ones her Dad always yelled about at the TV when the news was on.

Of course, at the age of two, it came out more like, "Mummy, I'm gonna make the sad people happy by letting them know I care on TV," but as Naomi grew up, that sentence became more concrete and easier to understand.

And Myra thought that if she could get Nom to say that sentence, or even remember how Naomi felt, that maybe everything was going to work out for Nom.

But Nom didn't know any of this, any of how Myra Best felt or even how she herself felt. She was somewhere between numb and absolutely writhing in pain, so she just bit her lip and plodded down the hallway to her mother, who was in the bathroom.

"Honey," Myra said. "I remembered that you wanted some extensions a couple of months ago, so I brought you some. I can tell you don't want to look different at your knew school, so I thought you could have these."

Deep down, Nom knew that her mother was trying to be as nice as she could, and so she smiled. It wasn't real or comfortable, and her mother sighed with knowledge and maybe even guilt, before standing up and rubbing her daughter's cheek tenderly.

"You know you are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me," she said softly, pulling her daughter in close. "It will be okay," she whispered into her Nom's naturally curly hair, as it shivered along with the rest of Nom's body. "I promise."

Nom didn't move. She didn't wrap her arm around her mother's body, but she didn't pull away, so they both just relished in the fact that in two days Nom would be gone and settling into a school she had no idea about.

"Mum?" Nom asked a few minutes later, pulling away gently. "Do you, uhm, know how to put in extensions?"

Myra smiled. "Let me show you, hun. Then we can get some very much needed sleep."

And so, after Nom got the hang of clipping in long, brown extensions into the back of her head, she took her mother's hand and closed her eyes as they walked past the front window and into her mother's room. There was a double bed there, and Nom felt warm again as she had someone to snuggle up with for the last time.


End file.
